Comparing and Contrasting File Systems used by Windows Essay

Comparing and Contrasting File formations used by Windows - Essay ExampleThis paper presents a comparison between the key accommodate strategys used by Windows Operating System - productive16, FAT32 & NTFS and also provides a brief intromission on Encrypted File System.The File system in Windows can be selected at the judgment of conviction of installation of the Operating System, or at the time of creating a lawful volume within a single physical hard disk or an array of hard disks using RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 5. Windows allows a rattling simple method to convert the file system of a logical volume from FAT 16 to FAT 32 or from FAT 32 to NTFS without taking down the server or liberation of data. However, Windows doesnt allow a backward conversion from NTFS to FAT 32 or from FAT 32 to FAT 16. For a backward conversion, the disk needs to be formatted and volumes created again. The characteristics of a file managed by the Operating System in terms of surface limitations & sec urity depend upon the file system chosen. The File Allocation put back (FAT) actually is a registry of hexadecimal values that identify the location of clumps within a logical partition. This helps the operating system to locate all the clusters constituting a file. This process is important because all clusters constituting a file are not stored at one place but are distributed across the entire impenetrable Disk Storage (a process called Fragmentation). The OS maintains two File Allocation Tables within a cluster such that if one is corrupted, the second can be used. The FAT assigns a hexadecimal address FFF7 to a bad cluster (due to surface or magnetic errors) such that the OS is able to recognize them go collating clusters to access a file. FAT16 has some distinct disadvantages that are addressed by FAT32 and FAT32 in turn waste some distinct disadvantages covered by NTFS. The following section presents the differences among the three native file systems and introduction t o the other file systems that are supported by Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 2000/2003.File Systems supported by Windows XP and Windows 2000/2003The FAT16 in earlier versions of MS DOS used to be 2 GB of logical partition (Volume) size but with the introduction of NT by Microsoft enabled it to support 4 GB of Logical partition (Volume) size. It has two primary limitations - length of file name and size of clusters in a 2GB/4GB partition. FAT16 supports a file size of nevertheless eight characters with three extension characters. No spaces in between characters were allowed. Moreover, the minimum cluster size in a 2GB/4GB partition is 32 KB. This lead to lot of wastage of disk space because file sizes of a fewer KBs used to block 32 KB clusters (A cluster cannot be shared it is always dedicated to a file). THE FAT16 file system supported limited entries in the boot file and limited number of files per directory. These limitations of FAT16 were eliminated by Microsoft by